To offer customers a wide variety of products that are readily available for delivery, a merchant (whether engaging in electronic or conventional “brick and mortar” commerce) may store those products in warehouses, fulfillment centers, or other inventory facilities. Keeping a product in inventory may serve to attenuate variations in customer demand and/or in a manufacturer or distributor's ability to supply that product. For example, in some cases, different products offered for sale by a merchant may have different manufacturer lead times, and holding certain quantities of those products “in stock” may enable a merchant to make such products available to customers in a more consistent fashion.
When a merchant operates more than one fulfillment center, an incoming order may require that one of its fulfillment centers be selected to fulfill that order. Using the so-called “greedy approach,” for instance, each order may be fulfilled by the fulfillment center that is geographically closest to the delivery address specified by the customer. This approach follows the general idea that it would be more expensive to ship the item to a given address from a fulfillment center that is more distant from that address. Similarly, other techniques used in selecting fulfillment centers may aim to minimize shipping costs for existing, outstanding orders.
There are certain situations, however, where an incoming order may specify a delivery address to which the costs of shipping an item from different fulfillment centers are approximately (or perhaps exactly) the same. In instances where there is no clear “winner” among two or more fulfillment centers, the merchant may, for example, randomly select any of those fulfillment centers to fulfill the order.
While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments thereof are shown by way of example in the drawings and will herein be described in detail. It should be understood, however, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit the invention to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the present invention as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.